The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  “Whatever this thing is, that’s what it does—it drinks from you and then it heals you. In every way. I’m just beginning to understand it, but I know one thing. Whatever it is, it’s been waiting for the blood of the betrayed. I gave it mine and it brought me justice. It saved my life and took away my grief. And now . . . now, Blake, it’s time for you to give it yours.”

  Blake is pulled to his feet. He’s not sure by whom. Caitlin’s holding the gun but it’s angled on the floor, and she’s pulling him toward the open door. And he’s letting her. When Nova grabs for him, Caitlin swings the gun on her. “Don’t worry. You can be next. Maybe those boys did more to you than you told your daddy. We can bring them here too.”

  “Let go of him!”

  Blake feels some form of protest bubble inside him and burst somewhere around his chest before it can become words. Caitlin shoves him gently through the open back door with one hand against his back, and he stumbles forward into the porch rail, and then they’re moving through the shadows toward the brightly lit gazebo. He can hear Nova in pursuit, but he can’t take his eyes off their destination. Surrounded by darkness, its floorboards cast aside, it looks like an ornate cellar door. And Caitlin is dragging him toward it by one hand. “Remember when we were kids? When we tried to become blood brother and sister? When I pricked your finger? Well, this will be just like that, Blake. Only much more special. So much more special.”

  He can hear himself crying now, or his best attempt to hold back the sobs. He is a rag doll in Caitlin’s one-handed grip, and the gun she carries is a third presence next to him, the reason Nova is following at a distance, her eyes mostly sclera, her terror evident in her inability to stand upright and the glances she’s casting back at the door and the murderer they’ve left bound inside.

  “You can’t do this!” Nova screams.

  “I’m not doing anything,” Caitlin snarls. “I’m giving him a choice.” In her free hand, Caitlin reaches down and picks up a pair of pruning shears from the red toolbox. One blade is slick with fresh blood. She tried, he thinks. She tried to use her own blood to kill him and it didn’t work, so now she wants mine. Needs mine. Why? Why the rush? Why now?

  “Blake,” Nova wheezes. “Don’t. Please. Please don’t . . .”

  As if to earn his trust, Caitlin sets the gun down on the ground between them. She takes his left hand in her right, the pruning shears at the ready in her left. She has angled his back to the tiny pit, as if she fears the sight of those thick, slick growths under the floorboards will frighten him out of consenting.

  But it is John Fuller’s fingers he feels gripping his palm, not Caitlin’s. Lifeless and unresponsive as the black water rises to swallow them both.

  Caitlin guides him backward. His heels strike the rise of the gazebo’s first step, and he finds himself stepping up and onto it. She’s pushing him even closer to the open floor, and he’s allowing it. Because all he feels are his own fingers grasping at John’s palms, striking and slipping, flint against a steel stone.

  “Caitlin . . .” All he can manage is this frail, breathy utterance of her name, but there is something in it that strikes at her, a certain tone that pierces the veil of comforting delusions she’s pulled around herself in the wake of having her world cracked in two. Maybe there was grief in it, Blake wonders, grief for John that got all tangled up and came out sounding like grief for the woman Caitlin was before she surrendered to rage and whatever power has come crawling up out of the earth around Spring House. No matter its source, the sound of it has made Caitlin go rigid with something that comes off her like fury. The open shears between them tremble with the promise of homicide.

  “They’re coming, Blake,” she says. “There were others. He’s been calling them all night. They’re coming.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I told them if they didn’t, I would send the tape to every news station in the country.”

  “You have the tape?” Blake asks.

  “What does it matter?”

  Blake sees it first, and when Caitlin sees the sight register in his eyes, she turns to see Nova holding her own gun on her. Her stance seems surprisingly steady, but it could be a trick of the shadows.

  “Get away from him,” Nova growls.

  “That’s not smart, Nova. Injure me and they’ll simply go for the wound. Then they’ll go after you for betray—”

  “Shut up! You have no idea what this is!” Nova shouts back. “And you have no right to force it onto someone else, not this way. Not like this.”

  “I’m not forcing it on anyone. Grown-ups don’t blame other people for the truth, Nova.”

  “You never lived the truth your whole life, you spoiled, crazy bitch. You’re nothing but privilege and lies. Something finally wakes you up after being so goddamn blind for so long, and now you think you have the right to drag someone else into your darkness? No way in hell! Get away from him. Or I will shoot you. I swear to God.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.” Caitlin turns away from this blast of hatred as if it were a puff of air. “We don’t have time for this, Blake.”

  “No,” Blake says.

  Maybe she expected him to whisper his refusal as if it were a shameful confession and she’s startled by his bluntness, because Caitlin stares at him, the pruning shears open in her right hand. “No?” she asks. “No, you won’t make a—”

  “No, I won’t do it. I—” Just thinking through his next words has steadied his heart, but before he can give voice to them he feels a white-hot strip of pain across his chest, and only then does he realize Caitlin has slashed him through his polo shirt from his left shoulder to his right hip. Nova screams.

  And then he hears the slick sound of sudden movement behind him, and Caitlin is backing away from him, arms spread, the bloody shears in her right hand. Her expression is sympathetic, and she is shaking her head back and forth as if Blake’s refusal to accept her gift is as despair-inducing as a battered wife’s refusal to file a police report against her husband.

  When the smell hits him, he spins, one hand flying to the dripping wound in his chest. There are four of them. They have risen from the pit, and now they stand erect, snakelike, like cobras without hoods. The obscenely large blossoms have opened and are angled at Blake. And the smell coming from them is impossible: smoke, fire—and something else. The overpowering musk of unchecked body odor, so strong and pungent it seems to come from an era without deodorant or soap or any other modern cosmetics.

  Blake’s eyes water, and when he opens his mouth to scream—Shoot it, Nova. Just shoot the damn thing!—he can taste the smell in the back of his throat, and when he blinks, he finds himself staring into darkness.

  . . . They have not come. The men, Felix promised her. The extra bodies that would make the backbreaking work of this prison more bearable for them all. She has waited for the wagons to bring them, waited to hear the horse hooves pounding the front drive and the soft muffled cries of new arrivals with faces as black as her own. But even though she had given him precisely the bounty he asked for, there are no new slaves. No greater and more compassionate division of labor.

  She has used her power to give them two growing seasons in one—twice the amount of cane and twice the amount of money Spring House has borne every year since its creation. But there has been no trade as Felix promised.

  Before her rage can turn to despair, she waits for Spring House to sleep, then she walks barefoot from the slave quarters so as to make no noise. When she reaches the edge of the field, the vast and verdant field she grew with her own magic, she lays her hands against the nearest stalk and gives the ghosts in the soil a single command.

  Die . . .

  There is a crackling like that of fire, but it is the skin of the cane stalks giving way as the life is sucked from each one by the earth itself. And within seconds, they are tumbling into one another like towers built on
swamp. And as they fall like shadowy, rustling dominoes, Blake can see past them to where Mike Simmons floats in a halo of fiery orange, eyes wide, gagged, and bound to a chair, his very presence beyond the field a portal between the present and the past. An invitation to unleash a similar rage as the one Virginie Lacroix released into the cane fields on which Felix Delachaise and Spring House drew all sustenance.

  NO!

  “No!” Blake screams.

  He is staring down at the clover of leaves that have opened at the tip of a new tendril—a hand extended in greeting. Not just greeting. Invitation.

  He does not give his hand in return; instead he takes a step backward, beholding the impossible being before him—its glowing blossoms and its slick green stalks—and utters the only words he can manage: “Fuck off.”

  When the gunfire breaks out, he assumes Nova has shot at the monstrous growths before him. But the sound comes from the wrong direction, and when he turns to look, he feels a terrible pressure against his chest—he looks down and realizes the vine has taken him despite his refusal. It’s wrapped around the wound Caitlin slashed in him with punitive, angry speed.

  Blake pitches forward, unsure whether he’s lost his balance or if the vines themselves are dragging him into the pit. By the time he hits the bottom and other coils of vine lurch beneath his sudden weight, he realizes it doesn’t matter; the vine wrapped around his chest has begun to drink.

  25

  Nova is vaguely aware that she’s holding her hands up in the air on either side of her head as she runs in a crouch. But it isn’t until she lands knees-first on the floor of the back porch that her spirit seems to crash back into her body. She spins until she’s got protection from the wall behind her. Her ears are ringing from the gunfire, and when she dares a peek around the edge of the doorway, she sees no sign of Caitlin, just the brightly lit gazebo and the sea of darkness beyond.

  No sound comes from the lair of the vines. If the gunfire has frightened Blake into silence, it’s a good sign, a sign he isn’t being torn apart or injured. But he’s out there, alone. From what she saw of it, the pit isn’t big enough to hide in; there’s nowhere for Blake to crawl in either direction.

  When the shooting started, she thought she’d fired the gun by mistake, but the muzzle flares from the far side of the garden made it clear in an instant the property had been invaded. Now, if whoever did the shooting comes forth out of the shadows, Blake will be exposed. And maybe his silence isn’t a good sign at all, maybe those things ate him. Because Caitlin Chaisson has no idea what she’s truly unleashed out here.

  She dropped the gun. The gunfire was so loud, so fierce and sudden, it felt as if the bullets were piercing her, even though they weren’t. She’s never been around gunfire in her life. Has never handled a gun for longer than a few seconds when she was a little girl and her father exploded into the room in a panic and tore it from her hands. If I wanted my baby to grow up around guns, I would have raised her in New Orleans! That was her father’s mantra, and now it’s left her defenseless. But none of that matters. Because she just dropped Caitlin’s gun like some stupid white girl in a movie she and her friends would jeer at from the third row.

  But she can see it. It lies a few feet from the back steps. From this distance, in the halo of light from the gazebo, it looks almost like a patent-leather shoe with a bright shiny buckle. And that only makes her think of the tie—Troy’s necktie—they just pulled from the vines, and now Blake is down there, down there alone and silent and—

  “Hey!”

  Mike Simmons is draped across the doorway between the front parlor and the back porch, his wrists still bound and pressed between his chest and the floor. He’s inch-wormed most of the way there on his side, and the exhaustion, pain, and exacerbated blood loss has left his jaw slack, his mouth drooling. He’s the color of milk, his bloodshot eyes ringed with purple.

  “Those—they’re my friends,” he wheezes. “She was calling them . . . threatening them. I heard her . . .”

  After scanning his prone, trembling body to make sure he isn’t bluffing, that he’s still bound, Nova spins away from the doorway, banishes a thought about whether or not bullets could pierce the porch wall behind her, and yanks her cell phone from her pocket. She finds Blake’s number.

  Gun. Halfway btwn gazebo n house.

  “She did this all wrong,” Mike wheezes. “See . . . we can figure this out . . . She’s crazy . . .”

  Her phone vibrates, flooding her with relief.

  Doesn’t matter.

  “Those are my friends,” the man whines. “Please. I can talk to them and—”

  “It doesn’t sound like they want to talk,” Nova says.

  “No, no, no. Listen—”

  “Shut up!” Nova hisses. But she can’t take her eyes off the phone.

  Why???

  Somewhere outside, in the great sea of darkness, a man is screaming. Mike jerks and goes still, eyes wide, drool puddling on the floor under his chin. Nova fights the urge to leap to her feet. But it’s not Blake. The sound is too far away. It must be coming from the same darkness the bullets came from, the same rain of gunfire that’s imprisoned her on the house’s back porch, and unlike the crazed sounds Jane Percival made the night before, this frenzied, blubbering eruption carries the sounds of sheer struggle as well as agony. And now she and Mike Simmons are both silent, the victims of a terrible unwanted connection as they are reduced to audience members for this symphony of pain. This is not the sound of a fight gone wrong, or a knife wound, or a gunshot to the leg. This is the sound of someone being—she feels her lips mouth the final word—eaten.

  Her phone vibrates in her hand with Blake’s response.

  Vines gone.

  “Scott,” Mike whispers. Fear and resistance have left his voice. He lets his head drop to the floor so hard his forehead knocks against the threshold.

  She can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing. What’s obvious is that he doesn’t feel the sudden, violent shift of the floorboards beneath them, doesn’t hear the rattle that courses through the wall behind her in response. Or he just chooses to ignore these things, just keeps his head pressed to the floor because his wrists are bound and there’s no way to cover his eyes with his hands like a frightened little boy.

  Then he retches like a cat trying to cough up a hairball, and suddenly he is rising up and off the floor.

  His wrists, still taped and bound, peel out from his bloody chest and dangle in the air below him as he is righted and lifted at the same time. For a moment or two, it looks like he is levitating. But by the time his bound ankles rise several inches into the air, he is hovering at a right angle to the floor, and through the blood covering his sternum, Nova can finally make out the slick, dark tentacle that has torn through the man’s stomach, then laced itself back through a hole in his throat, venting the breath from his screams.

  Behind his head, a great blossom unfurls. It is a giant, cartoonish version of the flower Nova glimpsed in the spot where Troy Mangier’s body should have been. The massive petals contain the fierce luminescence of another world as they open to swallow Mike Simmons’s head.

  26

  When Blake hears footsteps running in the direction of the gazebo, he is sure he’s waited too long, that he should have sprung from his hiding place and made a leap for the gun as soon as the terrible screams stopped. But he was too dazed by the sudden, silent departure of the vines that held him prisoner only seconds before, the way they branched off in two different directions, separating from each other cleanly, without the tearing of skin or the snapping of stalks, moving soundlessly into the soil, leaving him with the undeniable impression that the energy animating this life-form didn’t obey the physical laws of this world as much as it indulged them.

  Still flat on his back in what is now an empty, muddy hole in the earth, Blake reaches up with one hand to grab the neares
t loose board he can reach without revealing himself. He draws it to his chest in both hands. Only then does he realize the long gash across his chest has healed almost entirely from the vine’s patient suckling. Inside the tear in his polo shirt is a vague rosy scar that looks months old.

  The footsteps crunch past the gazebo in the direction of the house, past the spot where Nova dropped the gun. Blake leaps to his feet, board raised like a baseball bat, and sees the silhouette of a man racing toward the house’s kitchen door. There is nothing tensed or predatory about the man’s pose as he runs. It’s too dark to see if he’s armed, but he doesn’t hold his arms in front of him as if he’s aiming a gun. He’s just running like hell.

  Blake sees the gun right where Nova said it would be. By the time he has it in hand, the man has disappeared into the house.

  I’m not chasing him . . . yet. But something is.

  Inside the grand and deeply shadowed house, he hears thundering footsteps on the staircase, someone so desperate to get distance between himself and the ground he doesn’t care who hears his noisy ascent. The footsteps get louder when he hits the second floor. Doors are being thrown open. He’s trying to get higher . . . The widow’s walk.

  By the time Blake reaches the second-floor landing, the man is racing up the short wooden staircase to the small platform atop the house’s roof, the door swinging open behind him. Blake tears through it, taking the steps at an angle so he can keep his balance without lowering the gun.

  And then, in an instant, he’s reached the top, and now it’s just him and the crazed, mud-smeared stranger under a star-filled sky. The roof feels like a raft floating on a sea of oak trees. Beyond the canopy of huge branches covering the front drive, River Road is a ribbon of black hugging the base of the earthen levee yards away, and just beyond the levee’s dark swell, the blazing lights of a containership glide by on the river.